Modern Noncooperation

By

Jordan Jamison

     When Henry David Thoreau put down the words, “A government is best which governs least,” onto a piece of parchment, he never knew that his statement would be the base of anarchism more than a century later. As someone who does not consider himself an anarchist but instead a self-ruler, I agree with this. As we have seen, the government really does not have control over the people it governs. In the 1950s and 60s, possibly the most interesting decades in American history, this was found when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist preacher from Alabama, began a series of boycotts and protests because of the way Negroes were being treated in the South. The government realized that it wasn’t as powerful as it once thought it was. It realized that a government such as that of the United States’, although very large, could not control such a vast majority of people, which at the time and currently stands as the 3rd largest population of any country and 2nd of any democracy on Earth. If people choose to not cooperate with the United States government, what can it do? If the people aren’t going to listen than a democracy cannot stand. Not meaning to sound radical, but in a democracy you can get as much freedom as you want if you get enough people not cooperating with the State. I believe children should have more basic human rights, such as the right to vote, because a State cannot be a democracy if a fourth or more of its citizens cannot vote, and as most children agree with this statement, I could easily get followers who would boycott and protest and have a mass fast that the government would have to finally meet our needs. I mean, if 150 children are going to die on hunger strike because the government doesn’t cave into our needs, that doesn’t make the State looks so well, does it? With enough followers and enough passion and pure want, you can get any freedom you want-any idea- pushed in this glorious Country, the United States of America. As the Bible says, a kingdom will fall if it is divided. The United States is far from a kingdom, but the same basic rules apply to a republic as it does to a monarchy. A Grand Republic such as the State we live in will not stand, as I furiously repeat, if many of its citizens are working together to bring it down. Take for example the Glorious Revolutions of May ’68 in France, which saw the fall of the de Gaulle rule. If students- a huge minority of a country’s people- like the ones who fought against the horrendous and evil de Gaulle government step up as they should to see that children can vote, it WILL work. Guaranteed, even (as I strongly recommend, as physical violence in any form is completely and totally wrong) if you use nonviolence, which works in the form of mass boycotts which weaken a State’s economy, protests, marches such as the Good Friday, and fasting. If we all step up and simply want a share of the voice in a country that will soon pass into the hands of today’s children, it will work because we, the youth of the United States, are more powerful than the government of the Country. There, I finally got my point across. We, the youth of the United States of America, are far more powerful than the State that governs us because we are much more massive and we can get what we want if we simply put our minds to it and get off our video games and our TVs and participate in a Glorious Revolution that will see to it that children finally get a say in the government that I personally believe weakly governs such a vast majority of people. We will win the fight, children, even if it takes us to our Death which I am prepared to give up for the well-being of our children and our grandchildren, who will respect us being vital to the fact that they have the same basic human rights as adults have had since the middle of time (other than women, of course, who gained their right as humans early in the 20th century). We can achieve this if we can pull it off is masses and take down a weak government that should have never BEEN.